Child and adolescent development

Editor's Notes

• #2: going to discuss developmental theories, intelligence, and brain science relevant to education
• #4: Incredibly personal endeavor, teaching Not just about the students’ development. It is critically about your own Keep a running list of your own strengths and weaknesses
• #5: The brain is constantly busy doing something. In the name of schooling, we do lots of things in school that are counter to how the brain likes to engage in learning Learning is what the brain does. We just have to get out of its way.
• #6: To do whatever works to move forward a student’s cognitive efficacy (that means social, artistic, academic, all of it) Research: Daily piano lessons as good as more math instruction, makes better readers Rhythm training as good as sound-symbol training for decoding basic sounds Includes all the multiple intelligences, subjects, relationships, etc. but with the goal of changing the brain to make it more effective. This is our job. We need to be sure that our choices as teachers match how the brain likes to learn. NOT learning styles NPR, debunking, the brain DOES NOT like a certain modality. It likes to use them all simultaneously.
• #7: Universal Human: may not sound like differentiation, but if you do what the research suggests, much more likely to support the developmental and unique needs of your students
• #9: To be the teacher that makes this not true A statement of the mismatch between schools and what the brain likes
• #13: Gordon Sherman New Grange Princeton NJ
• #16: Intelligence tests, WISC being most prominent Highly volitle until 8 or 9 years old Subtests can swing up to 15 points across adolescence Highly dependent on language Any IQ test measures analytical intelligence (ERB, IOWA’s) which is a thin sliver of what intelligence is. Analytical is verbal knowledge, fluid reasoning, patterns, sequences, analyzing data, memory component. Doesn’t measure creative, social, practical
• #17: We don’t detract from Tiger because of his cooking, yet we say, yes, Karen is great in English, but she REALLY struggles in math. I’m not sure she’s going to graduate. NO Full-scale IQ
• #19: Imagine this scale to be your school’s student population If the student-environment What about the kids who are skilled in the “non=school” items
• #20: Did you know that some kids don’t learn to read until 7 or so, without being dyslexic? And without being distinguishable from peers later?
• #22: Dave Packard Back to einstein and shaw: what does it mean for someone to be enormously successful in their lives, but “not right” for our schools?
• #24: 1960‘s One of the first to go against the psychometric model of intelligence
• #27: Hit hard in terms of independent schools Independent schools v. real world
• #29: Major source of student behavioral struggle Consider these when you are having trouble with a student as a way to think about a starting place to help them
• #30: 5-13 yo Child comparing self-worth to others (such as in a classroom environment) Child can recognize major disparities in personal abilities relative to other children. Erikson places emphasis on the teacher, who should ensure that children do not feel inferior. 13-21 Identity vs. Role Confusion - Adolescent / 12 years till 18. Questioning of self. Who am I, how do I fit in? Where am I going in life? Erikson believes, that if the parents allow the child to explore, they will conclude their own identity. However, if the parents continually push him/her to conform to their views, the teen will face identity confusion.
• #40: Partially constructed at birth Not done until 20 Fine tuning until mid-forties
• #41: No grade levels No science behind the idea brains are just a different in rates of growth as bodies No grade levels: Look at any given age. You see wide range of physical traits. Brain development is just as uneven.
• #43: late adoptions infants recognize all human phonemes Babies have same number of connections as adults at birth, double or triple until 3, then cuts back dramatically. By 8, back to adult numbers. p58 At puberty, starts all over again with major growth, followed by pruning.
• #44: DL-PFC motor planning, organization, and regulation. Sensory and mnemonic information regulation of intellectual function and action. working memory. OFC sensory integration, affective value of reinforcers, decision-making and expectation.[1] planning behavior sensitivity to reward and punishment.[4] After that, it’s mylenation
• #45: Like starting the engine of a powerful race car with a really unskilled driver behind the wheel Amygdala swollen Prefrontal cortex shuts down on surge days suppresses sleep chemicals Hormones: testosterone overstimulates amygdala, anger bursts Girls surges of estrogen can lead to anxiousness and feelings of being overwhelmed Both much less controllable than in adults.
• #47: Effects: Cardio-blood pressure is deregulated Too much adrenaline scars blood vessels, increasing susceptibility to stroke and heart attack. Immune response is weakened Study: drama students at UCLA. One group happy scripts all day, the other sad. Blood levels showed dpressed immune response in sad group Learning: Stressed adults do 50% worse than non-stressed Stress in the home: Kids who watch parents fight have consistently higher levels of cortisol in their urine
• #48: Mechanism: Immediate release of adrenaline, fight flight Followup release of glucocorticoids (cortisol), which wipes out the unpleasant effects, resetting us to normalcy System designed for bursts of stress. When there is ongoing stress, the hormone builds up and is harmful. Hippocampus has lots of cortisol receptors If stress is not severe, the hippocampus performs better If too much, can prevent neurogenesis and can eventually kill hippocampal cells
• #49: Math anxiety Tara study Regulatory skills make the difference Ramped up physiology Response to aversive stimulus Feeling out of Chronic: Deregulates blood pressure Increases stroke or heart attack Depresses immune system Hippocampus has lots of cortisol receptors: blocks neurogenesis
• #51: American high schools are the most “sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents” What about alternate paths to adulthood (jobs, apprenticeships) that place adolescents alongside adults? We sequester them.
• #52: Paired tone with shock for mice, neutral color with a horrible noise for humans, which evoked fear response. Children, adolescents and adults. All associated the two, sweat response (meaning fear). Over next few days, showed the color without the noise. Children and adults dissociated the two. Adolescents remained as fearful as when they started, high alert. Mice 30 days later (adulthood) responded as if the experiment had just been done. Do humans take adolescent fears so strongly into adulthood?
• #53: A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly: “Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?” He gets even more specific: “You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?” The kid was ready. Ready, man! For an anger blast to his face….”How could you do that?” “What’s wrong with you?”…and for the big boot out of school. But he was NOT ready for kindness. The armor-plated defenses melt like ice under a blowtorch and the words pour out: “My dad’s an alcoholic. He’s promised me things my whole life and never keeps those promises.” The waterfall of words that go deep into his home life, which is no piece of breeze, end with this sentence: “I shouldn’t have blown up at the teacher.” Whoa. And then he goes back to the teacher and apologizes. Without prompting from Sporleder.
• #55: Ratey’s work
• #56: Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, testing motor neurons, surprised to see them fire when another monkey did something. Fire whether you move or just see movement Purposeful vs. random actions and movements The contagious yawn Possibly the origins of language through shared gestures and facial expressions Empathy starts, not with higher order thought, but with running when others run, laughing, crying yawning, sleeping, Yawn contagion works across species Imagining flexing a muscle increases both brain activity and muscle strength Cleveland Clinic Foundation, cited in SciAm Mind March/April p14 “Brainpower”
• #57: One understands what another is doing or saying because they are in fact experiencing the same action.
• #59: Even with no prior expectation, face to face contact, brain registers as pain DACC registers pain, insula judges pain severity Personality is not related to how severely the pain registers Not related to whether or not you like or dislike the person shunning you Why: Survival SciAmMind Jan/Feb 2011
• #60: Ostraka: broken shards of pottery--ie. disposable True across all social animals (in non-humans, usually end up dead) Even in studies using computer avatars, those left out reported sadness, anger, low levels of belonging, lack of meaning in their real lives SciAmMind Jan/Feb 2011
• #62: Reminder: Emotions connected to learning and memory
• #63: What causes emotions to run too high? stress
• #65: Where can we give kids autonomy, purpose? Ask, What could you do to Let kids create social contract for class Let kids come up with logical consequences when they cross the line Kids articulate rubric criteria evaluate their own work and the work of others choose direction for curriculum student honor councils
• #71: Self:” Efficacy, Emotions, Beliefs about learning Metacognitive: monitoring learning goals, accuracy, clarity, execution
• #72: Ultimately and argument for richness in experience that school structure has forced us to have to articulate Possible place to include piano lessons making kids better at language and the same as math with less instruction Gardner is not in favor of using this as a way of measuring intelligence. They’s taken my little theory and they’ve developed an entire industry out of it.
• #73: Research on persistence
• #74: A person can’t learn any more than their personal next step. Boredom is bad. Freaking out from stress is bad. Feeling effective is good.
• #78: Music Athletics Dance
• #79: Talk about: Architecture 2 major concepts of brain’s functional organization: Modularity and Plasticity WHY? Understanding the architecture and control over your own brain has shown learning gains
• #80: Warm butter, jelly, soft tofu, toothpaste Doubled in size over our evolution 3 lbs, 2% of average body weight, but 20% of energy consumed Enough electricity to keep a 25W light bulb burning Responsible for every poem, every slam dunk, every war, every act of love, every song, every conversation Impossibly incomplete overview
• #81: Converts photon energy, sound waves, and physical vibrations and pressure into electrical signals. Uses really poor input material to generate our experience. Fills in gaps of sensory input, sometimes getting it wrong. Rewires itself all the time. This is learning. Does lots of work we don’t know about. poor signal: yell at a feather and try to move it with your sound waves (no breath) ears ringing after a show study of letters on screen, fMRI Waking up with the answer We don’t question that our computer does lots of work aside from what we tell it. In fact, we’ll see in the sleep section how important this is.
• #82: Optical illusions are studied regularly in cognitive neuroscience.
• #87: Vision is King! Use it all over the place! Fully analyzed opinion of what the brain thinks is there. NOT A CAMERA The brain completely deconstructs the signal, then reconstructs it with what it thinks you should be seeing. You are hallucinating right now: Retinal blind spots are filled in by the brain with what is most likely to be there. Charles-Bonnet syndrome: 2 little policemen escorting a tiny criminal into a matchbox size van. Sufferers know it’s not real. Takes about half of the brains working resources Take oral presentation: 10 % memory after 72 hours. 65% if you add visuals Blind sight
• #93: Teaching kids about the brain helps them learn. Math study where kids were taught either more math, or about the changing nature of the brain
• #94: Considerations beyond the simple senses We see consciously,but also process sight unconsciously Story : Blind sight Story: learning to see Vision is for vision: braille, tongue reading Activity: Hand motions
• #96: Talk about the need for hands on! Thumbs on today’s students must be even larger
• #97: Connect HIppocampus to cortex
• #98: Do “n” story activity Do pitcher activity if possible
• #99: The 15 point swing I mentioned was correlated to an increase in the motor areas of speech production (verbal), and the motor areas of hand use (perceptual) London cabbies--Hippocampus makes a map of the external world
• #101: Reduces, but never goes away
• #102: Lot’s of effort, but 50% reduction in dementia
• #103: When we have this urge, we are likely seeing a constellation of EFs not being realized
• #110: Emotions DO add charge to memories. They just aren’t more accurate
• #112: HM: man with destroyed hippocampus had no memory of learning a new procedural skill, but got better at it over time Semantic: meanings, understandings, and other concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experiences Episodic: (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual knowledge) Procedural: performance of a task without conscious awareness of these previous experiences
• #113: Nouns are stored in a place vowels are stored in a place (Stroke victim: Your dog chased the cat: Yr dg chsd th ct: vowels are in a different place than consonants
• #114: Ask for types of cortex, make point about memory being better for having done the hand signals
• #115: Memory and Learning Study: after a session of explicit learning, if a similar task was undertaken within 2 hours, the original learning was displaced. Cortex to hippocampus,listen in on what the cortex is receiving, hippocampus has return axons. Much of this happens when we sleep The hippocampus doesn’t stop this loop until the memory is stable. It can take years. • Declarative memories are stored in the same sensory cortical regions HIppocampus seems to be where the neurons created from exercise migrate to. When you remember something, it becomes unstable, and is reencoded with changes Story: Man with damaged Hippocampus can lay down new memories, retains old ones, can’t recognize aged faces.
• #116: Considerations beyond the simple senses We see consciously,but also process sight unconsciously Story : Blind sight Story: learning to see Vision is for vision: braille, tongue reading Activity: Hand motions
• #117: Forget 90% of what we learn in a typical class in 30 days. Medina
• #118: What would make a subject personally relevant? French revolution, themes of adult power, kids feeling a lack of control, all very relevant for a teen.
• #119: About 30 seconds to do something with it. Saying it back to your self very powerful The more elaborately we encode the information, the better we remember it. Memory traces are stored in the part of the cortext that perceived and processed it. We retrieve learning best in the context and state it was encoded in. Ideas: Real-world experiences: You need to know the meaning to best encode Compelling introductions Most of the factors that predict whether something learned will be remembered happen in the first few seconds of exposure.